By David Brooks / The New York Times
Americans used to be enthusiastic about the idea of progress. If you had attended any of the World’s Fairs that were put on over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries in cities including Philadelphia, St. Louis, Chicago and New York, you would have seen great festivals celebrating the wonders of the future. If you went to Disney World, you could have visited Tomorrowland and the Carousel of Progress.
But gradually intellectuals and then lots of other people lost faith in progress, in the idea that growth, technology and innovation would make the future better than the past. In 2011 Virginia Postrel published a book called “The Future and Its Enemies,” arguing that the true division in politics is not left vs. right but dynamists vs. stasists. Dynamists believe in open-ended change. Stasists are in protective mode. We don’t need to rush pell-mell into the future, they say; we need to take care of our own.
This conflict is now roiling the Republican Party. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are dynamists. They want to welcome talented immigrants to the U.S. economy for the same reason the New York Mets are spending more than $700 million to sign Juan Soto. You could field a team with all native-born players, but you couldn’t hope to compete with the best in the world.
This has elicited howls of outrage from those who want to restrict immigration, including supporters of canceling the H-1B visa program for skilled immigrants. We should be employing Americans in these jobs, those on MAGA’s rightward edge respond. The vaunted technological progress the dynamists worship has ripped American communities to shreds.
This is not a discrete one-off dispute. This is the kind of core tension you get in your party when you do as Donald Trump has done: taken a dynamic, free-market capitalist party and infused it with protective, backward-looking, reactionary philosophy. We’re going to see this kind of dispute also when it comes to economic regulation, trade, technology policy, labor policy, housing policy and so on.
It’s normal for people like me to have contempt for the reactionaries. We’re in an epic race with China over the future, over who will master artificial intelligence and other technologies. Of course we need to attract the world’s best talent.
But the reactionaries have a point. One of my favorite sayings from psychology is that all of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base. The reactionaries are right to point out that the past few decades of go-go change have eviscerated many people’s secure bases: stable families, vibrant hometowns, plausible career paths for those who didn’t want to go to college, the stable values that hold communities together.
I don’t know if Trumpism will ever evolve into a serious governing force, but if it does, then resolving the tension between its dynamists and its stasists will be its chief mission; that is, giving regular people a sense that they are being taken care of and seen, so that they feel secure enough to welcome all the bounty that skilled immigrants and technological change brings to our lives.
In its own cranky way, MAGA is now having an interesting internal debate.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2024.
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